Yesterday (less than 6 weeks after I made the request), I received the response. The key item was an Excel spreadsheet with meaningful responses from 195 individuals and 3 scientific societies (American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Genetics Society of America, American Association of Immunologists). The names and email addresses of the individuals (as well as some other bits of information) were redacted although institutional affiliation information was included where provided.

As a first pass at the analysis, I coded each response as Supportive of an Emeritus Award, Not Supportive of an Emeritus Award, or Mixed. The results were almost evenly divided with 92 Supportive, 85 Not Supportive, and 21 Mixed.

Some of the responses disclosed that the respondent was a senior scientist who would potentially have been or would be a potential applicant for an emeritus award. I searched the responses for such disclosures and identified 17 individuals. All 17 were supportive of the concept of a potential emeritus award.

I also examined the institutional affiliations of the respondents where provided. The institutions for which more than 2 responses were received included:

Note that this parallels, to some extent, institutions that have a large number of grantees (Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins , University of Michigan, and University of Washington are in the top ten in terms of overall NIH funding. However, Harvard Medical School and the three affiliated hospitals listed account for approximately $300M in NIH funding (or ~1 %) yet they accounted for 11/198 = 5.5% of the responses; 7 out of these 11 responses were scored as positive.

I will continue to examine the responses and share some of the more interesting comments.

What are the take-home lessons here?

First, the response rate is typical for this sort of RFI at a few hundred responses. This represents a very small selection of the biomedical research community, substantially less than 1% of grantees and applicants. Note that I used the term selection instead of sample since their is certainly bias in who chose to take the time to respond.

Second, the responses are more substantially more positive than those seen on blogs. Of course, the blog response is likely biased toward those who are younger and more likely to be negative while the RFI response may be biased toward those with self-interested positions.

Third, the FOIA process here was relatively painless and quick in this case.

I urge you whenever NIH issues an RFI on a topic of interest to you or your colleagues, take the time to take a look at it and respond as appropriate. Your voice can't be heard if you don't speak out and it only takes a few minutes to respond.

The online comments should not be dismissed, however. I realize blogs are somewhat uncontrolled, but still they allow people to comment openly without worrying about being identified or singled out. The NIH should find a way to incorporate them into their 'analysis'.

I went to respond to the RFI, and when I saw how much identifying information they wanted about me I backed away. As an ESI/NI I don't want my program officers' first notice of me to be "that jealous chick who wants to keep money away from our long-time friends." RFIs are only for people with an established relationships with their POs.

I think you are being a bit paranoid here. I doubt very few if any POs even have access to the responses with names not redacted and, even if they did, I doubt they would respond negatively. There is also a down side to not responding as this post reveals.

Thanks Datahound! I'm not surprised that it was more positive in the RFI as you have to identify who you are and the the fear of being blackballed within the NIH for saying what you really think is very real with younger faculty. That being said, it will be interesting to see what people said in their responses.

The greybeards at Harvard are well known for performing vertically ascending science, so why shouldn't they get this fluffjob, er.. Emeritus grant, on the way out as a thank you for all they have done for science?

I'm on several newsletters from two ICs, and the RFI was headlined a few times, maybe that's the "you sent me this questionnaire," comment. My Dept chair also has forwarded this info to the faculty list serv and encouraged everyone to give input. So far as I can gather, no one did.

[…] should you take a few minutes out of your day to do this? Former NIGMS Director Jeremy Berg submitted a FOIA request for the responses of a previous RFI regarding the controversial “Emeritus… As a result of this, many of us were surprised to hear that the NIH received just over 200 […]